Cascaded Deep Neural Networks for Retinal Layer Segmentation of Optical Coherence Tomography with Fluid Presence

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technology which can provide micrometer-resolution cross-sectional images of the inner structures of the eye. It is widely used for the diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases with retinal alteration, such as layer deformation and fluid accumulation. In this paper, a novel framework was proposed to segment retinal layers with fluid presence. The main contribution of this study is two folds: 1) we developed a cascaded network framework to incorporate the prior structural knowledge; 2) we proposed a novel deep neural network based on U-Net and fully convolutional network, termed LF-UNet. Cross validation experiments proved that the proposed LF-UNet has superior performance comparing with the state-of-the-art methods, and incorporating the relative distance map structural prior information could further improve the performance regardless the network.